About Fall Line

A quiet dazzler of a new novel...Of all the contemporary Southern novels today that draw comparisons to Faulkner and O’Connor, Starnes’ tale may be one of the few that deserves them. The unsentimental but glorious world seen through the eyes of a “half mutt half chow” fearful of man and guns is pure Faulkner. Elmer, condemning the bigwigs around him for “their fondness for impure women and liquor and money and the love of their own images reflected in shiny glass,” echoes the righteous, scathing hatred of Hazel Motes (“Wise Blood”).  --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

With Fall Line, Joe Samuel Starnes has written a novel that accrues force the way a swollen river becomes a torrent. -- TriQuartely Review 

Told from various viewpoints, Fall Line is an affectionate, eloquent story of loss and survival. -- Teresa Weaver, Atlanta Magazine

Starnes is "an expert in local color doing right by his all-but-vanished region." -- Publishers Weekly

If you liked Deliverance by James Dickey, you'll like Fall Line by Joe Samuel Starnes. The Oogasula is about to be dammed by the Georgia Power Company and to hell with the folks whose houses and graves are going to be flooded. Some people take the money. One of them takes the law into his own hands. This novel is vividly alive with people (and a great dog) and the river. -- John Casey, author of Compass Rose and Spartina, winner of the National Book Award

Starnes's evocatively Southern story may well have readers wanting to check their shoes for red mud or find an old hound to pat. Fall Line's message transcends region, however, leaving us at once troubled by man's sins against nature and himself, yet knowing somehow that both will endure. -- James C. Cobb, author of The South and America since World War II



Click here to listen to a November 2011 interview on Rowan University Radio.

Book Description: December 1, 1955. Floodgates are poised to slam shut on a concrete dam straddling the Oogasula River, creating a lake that will submerge a forgotten crossroads and thousands of acres of woodlands in rural Georgia. Fall Line unfolds in one day's action, as viewed through the eyes of Elmer Blizzard, a troubled ex-deputy; Mrs. McNulty, a lonely widow who refuses to leave her doomed shack by the river; her loyal, aging dog, Percy; and a rapacious politician, State Senator Aubrey Terrell, for whom the new lake is named. A story of land grabs, wounded families, bitterness, hypocrisy, violence, and revenge in the changing South, Fall Line is populated by complex characters who want to do the right thing but don't know how. Starnes's novel is a memorable, beautiful, and heartbreaking tale of a backwater hamlet's damaged people and transformed landscape.